Overview

This book investigates the literary imaginings of the postcolonial city through the lens of crime in texts set in Naples and Mumbai from the 1990s to the present. Employing the analogy of a ‘black hole,’ it posits the discourse on criminality as a way to investigate the contemporary spatial manifestations of coloniality and global capitalist urbanity. Despite their different histories, Mumbai and Naples have remarkable similarities. Both are port cities, ‘gateways’ to their countries and regional trade networks, and both are marked by extreme wealth and poverty. They are also the sites and symbolic battlegrounds for a wider struggle in which ‘the North exploits the South, and the South fights back.’ As one of the characters of the novel The Neapolitan Book of the Dead puts it, a narrativisation of the underworld allows for a ‘discovery of a different city from its forgotten corners.’ Crime provides a means to understand the relationship between space and society/culture in a number of cities across the Global South, by tracing a narrative of postcolonial urbanity that exposes the connections between exploitation and the ongoing ‘coloniality of power.’

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9781138303874

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Reviews

This book offers a fascinating and illuminating comparison of Naples and Mumbai. In its readings of postcolonial texts 'through criminal eyes', this study encourages an important rethinking of the relationship between crime, postcolonialism and the urban environment.' -Susheila Nasta, Founding Editor of Wasafiri and Professor Emerita at Queen Mary College, University of London, UK. Juxtaposing fictional works representing the criminal worlds of Mumbai and Naples, Maria Ridda argues convincingly that contemporary discourses of crime both expose the hidden truth of extractive capitalism and are essential to understanding postcolonialism. Developing Marx's insight that criminal laws are intrinsic to capitalist development, and Gramsci's critique of how the 'South' is subjugated through mechanisms of consent, Ridda deftly combines literary analysis, historical contextualisation, and urban theory to open up exciting new avenues for Postcolonial Studies. -David Johnson, Professor of Literature, The Open University, UK Metropolitan peripheries and the disdained souths of the world now overlap and intersect, becoming central to contemporary political and criminal power. The critical studies in this book are elegant testimony to the ethical and aesthetic implications of the violent and seemingly implacable processes of criminality. -Iain Chambers, Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, University of Naples L'Orientale

Author Information

Maria Ridda is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature and Director of the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kent. She specialises in contemporary South Asian writing, Mediterranean studies, and the intersection between the idea of Europe and Empire today. She is the author of Imagining Bombay, London, New York and Beyond: South Asian Writing from 1990 to the Present (2015), and has published widely in journals such as Interventions, Postcolonial Studies, and Postcolonial Text. She is the co-editor of ‘Decolonising the State’ (Laursen et al., 2020).

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